Feast of Pentecost Year A May 15, 2005
Ezekiel 11:17-20 Psalm 33:12-15, 18-22 Acts 2:1-11 John 20:19-23

The Firebird

You see, I was going to begin this Pentecost sermon by telling you about an encounter with a scarlet tanager a few weeks ago. This was the first spring in two years when I have felt well enough to do what I love, that is meander through woods and fields, binoculars in hand, a one-woman welcoming committee for the migratory birds arriving after their long and arduous journeys northward.

Having been long deprived of this pleasure by illness, I was this year plunging deeply into bird watching, spending more time than ever before outside, thrilling to cascading songs, moving slowly, binoculars at the ready, toward peripherally perceived flutters, catching my breath again and again at a flash of yellow, a burst of indigo.

Amidst all this avian bounty I was still waiting, though, for a favorite and personally significant bird, the scarlet tanager. While I was on retreat some years ago, one presented itself to me in a dream, and then was kind enough to make a waking-world appearance the next day, a kind of confirmation, as I walked in the deep woods near the hermitage where I was staying. So, scarlet tanagers have become for me particular messengers of the Holy Spirit, helped in this role no doubt by the sublime and heart-stopping fiery crimson they wear.

So, there I was several weeks ago now, bundled in sweater and rain gear and rubber boots, tromping through our creek-side meadow on a cold drizzly immensely gray day. It was so gray, in fact, that the whole world seemed drained of color, a black and white photograph of itself.

I wouldn't have been out there in all that drear but for the fact that the leaves were rapidly unfurling. You see, tanagers are canopy birds. They hang out high in the tree tops of South American rainforests during the winter and make their way to their mating grounds by following northwards the spring greening of the North American forest canopy. There are just a few days in the spring when the leaves are open enough for the tanagers to have arrived, but not open so far that the tanagers can no longer be easily seen.

Of course, there is always the possibility no tanagers will show up. I’m no fool. I know the rainforests are being destroyed at an alarming rate and I fear each Spring that the birds who depend on those diminishing resources for their winter habitat are not going to survive to return to us.

This Spring, my waiting for the tanager had somehow become all entangled with a variety of other hopes – for the recovery of this planet from our abuses of its generously offered resources, for the dim but tenacious possibility that we humans might learn how to care for and honor one another, for the mending of wounds and illnesses in lives close to mine, for the possibility that I myself might be becoming well.

So, hoping, waiting, I stood in the chill drizzle of a black and white April day. I was about to give up and retreat to the ruddy warmth of the fire burning in our woodstove when I heard it; the unmistakable sweet clear territorial song of the male scarlet tanager, right above where I was standing. I clapped the binoculars to my face and peered upward through the muted grays and blacks of leaf buds and wet branches until, yes!, at the very top of a sycamore, there he was. O glorious creature!

The red of a scarlet tanager is like the blue of a bluebird. It is a color not of this world. It seems to smolder with an inner glow that illuminates but does not consume. That bird was like a Pentecostal flame burning on the branch tip, a tongue of fire announcing the down pouring of the Spirit which comes to Nature with the Spring. And, I swear, it was the only thing in the whole landscape that was in color, as if hand-colored on a otherwise black and white picture by God.

To me it spoke without words the understanding that hope is real and good and necessary and a gift of the Holy Spirit. I suddenly remembered the poet Emily Dickinson’s description of hope as “that thing with feathers” and wondered if she, too, was a student of birds. Oh, how I wish I had the capacity to contain and keep these moments of revelation, permanent dwellings in which I might live day in and day out. But, that doesn’t seem to be my gift.

And so, after I’d given myself over for a few moments to the silly dance of waving goofily up at a tree while joyfully shouting “Welcome back!” – good thing we don’t have near neighbors -- I began to worry about how tired this small traveler of great distances must be. I became aware of how cold I was and I wished I could knit a little sweater for him to insulate his inner fire against the penetrating damp. And then, since I am capable of filling all the available mental space with worry given half a chance, I began to ache with a resonating loneliness for him as he sang his solitary mating song into the drizzle up there at the top of the sycamore. What if no lady tanager makes it back, I fretted. How terribly terribly sad that would be, and what would that say about the efficacy of hope?

In the weeks since that first sighting, I’ve heard his mating song wafting through the treetops any number of times and even been granted occasional sightings of winged flame. And each encounter has called forth in me that strange and oh so human mixture of joyful hope and fearful doubt. The continued presence of the tanager became for me a reminder to engage with the mystery of the Holy, to further develop my Holy Spirit vocabulary which speaks to me the presence of God, teaching me to know that Presence, thereby consecrating more and more of my daily experience.

Here’s an example. This past Tuesday, at dusk, after an unnerving trip to the ER with my spouse and having just left him at the hospital, neither of us knowing yet the state of his heart, I stopped at Bloomingfoods to pick up something to eat on my weary way home. My heart felt rock-heavy in my chest. I was plain tired of being an adult. I felt a sharp longing for some one else to be the grown up for awhile. I needed to be held.

And I was thinking, with some trepidation, about this sermon, wondering if God had anything to say through me and ruing the choices I’d made from among the available lections. I’d thought to say some very clever things about the two vastly different versions of the giving of the Holy Spirit related in the Acts passage and the gospel – you know, one pre-ascension, one post-, one with Jesus breathing on the disciples, one with those disembodied tongues of flame. But right then, I could have cared less about incongruent stories. I would have welcomed the arrival of the Holy Spirit as communicator of God’s Presence in any form it should care to take.

With my blackened tofu sandwich in hand and preoccupied with these thoughts, I made my way out of the store and almost fell over a very small child who was standing at the top of the long cement handicapped ramp that runs the length of the building. She had straight black hair cut in bangs and even in the gathering dark I could see that she was wearing a red T-shirt. She chirped in bird-like tones, “One, two, three…go!” and then took off down the ramp with that sturdy precariousness peculiar to children who have just learned how to run.

Now, I was the sort of parent who could envision split chins, lost teeth, lots of blood, concussions and a trip to the ER whenever one of my kids took off running downhill. But my sense of concern for her safety was swept away by her delight in her new bodily skills and her total trust of the man, obviously her father, who stood at the bottom of the ramp. As she engaged in the three-year-old version of hurtling, her father knelt down and, laughing, extended his arms wide to receive her giggling wriggling joyful little body.

Oh my goodness, it’s God and me, I realized, as the weight in my chest dissolved into tears. Heart of stone becomes heart of flesh. If I had any doubt that the Holy Spirit, God’s conduit for grace, had just made an appearance, it was erased by the realization that the little girl was wearing those silly sneakers that that have fiber optic lights imbedded their heels. All the way down the long ramp and into her father’s open-hearted embrace, she was sending out sole fire into the night with every step.

I don’t much care if the Holy Spirit showed up on Easter morning or fifty days later. I don’t much care if it wore the form of breath or wind or fire or feathers or sneakers with sparks. I just care that it arrived, that it continues to arrive and that I have been given the slow grace of being able to recognize it when it comes.

The Holy Spirit is God speaking God’s empowering love into our hearts every moment, speaking to each of us in our own native language. We are like people who have long wandered in exile, forgetting our Mother tongue. When the Spirit whispers, and sometimes shouts, to us in that long-lost language of home, we begin to remember what we once knew. We begin to remember who we once were and can become again.

And the Holy Spirit does not tire of bringing to our doubting minds and faltering hearts the confirming witness of God’s abiding presence. As I began the writing of this sermon, you will remember, I was temporarily distracted by the beating of wings and a flash of red outside my window. I ran downstairs to get the binoculars.

When I got back to my desk and trained the binoculars on the branch where the movement had been, I saw a tanager, all right. But not the male I had expected. Instead, in the center of the lenses’ circle, a female, yellow-green, the color of Spring, perched quietly.

As I watched enthralled, she was joined by her scarlet mate, dancing and flickering around her like a fire sent from heaven, despite the heavy rain that was now falling. And, piercingly sweet through my open window came his song, vibrant with the Holy language of love. AMEN. .